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Category Archives: Crime / Punishment / Justice Theory

Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia have seized a container ship operated by the Mediterranean Shipping Co., weeks after authorities found more than $1 billion worth of cocaine on the vessel in what was one of the largest drug busts in American history.

US Customs and Border Protection seized the ship on July 4, a statement out Monday said. The ship is owned by client assets in a maritime strategy offered by JPMorgan Asset Management, according to a person familiar with the matter. It is operated by the Switzerland-based MSC.

On June 17, border agents found 39,525 pounds of cocaine stashed in several containers on the MSC Gayane at the Philadelphia seaport. The street value of the drugs was estimated at about $1.3 billion, making it the largest cocaine seizure by the agency.

Greenblatt’s ADL has become notorious for undermining its mission by putting out fake hate crime statistics. And these fake statistics were as surreally egregious as they were confusing.

The executive summary of the ADL’s annual report claimed that, “2018 was a particularly active year for right-wing extremist murders: Every single extremist killing — from Pittsburgh to Parkland — had a link to right-wing extremism.” This false claim was quickly picked up and repeated by the media.

Typically, the ADL report contradicts itself when it later claims that, “Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists.”

Is it “every” or “almost all”?

The trick here is that the ADL report exploits any link, no matter how tenuous or dubious, to make its first claim, while its second claim essentially concedes that the shooters weren’t “right-wing extremists”.

How is it possible for a killer to have links to “right-wing extremism” without being a “right-wing extremist”? Why even try to link people who aren’t “right-wing extremists” to “right-wing extremism”?

The Parkland school shooting, whose 17 victims serve as a huge part of the report’s dubious statistics, illustrate how the ADL manufactures a link to “right-wing extremism”.

Attributing the Parkland school shooting to “right-wing extremism” is a conspiracy theory. The ADL began pushing this conspiracy theory after the shooting based on an interview with a white supremacist group. The ADL’s fake news was picked up by everyone from the Associated Press to Neo-Nazis, but the discredited social justice group got the material from alt-right trolls on 4chan. And even after the claims were disproven, the ADL refused to retract it and has chosen to double down on its fake news.

Cruz did appear to have etched swastikas on his ammo magazines, but he also told the authorities that he heard voices in his head. He had said racist and anti-Semitic things, but all but one of his victims were white. Five of his seventeen victims were Jewish, but Parkland has a sizable Jewish population. It’s possible that Cruz targeted Jewish students and faculty, but there’s no actual evidence of that.

And the ADL’s original assertion of a link to “right-wing extremism” long ago fell apart. But instead of retracting it, the ADL is exploiting the Parkland shooting to push fake hate crime statistics.

The ADL’s reports usually contradict themselves. And this one is no exception. It lists murders by Tierre Guthrie and Malachi Qaadir Dorns, African-American members of black nationalist Moorish groups. While Moorish groups do use terms like “sovereign citizen”, it’s highly misleading to define them as “right-wing”, especially considering the misleading impression that this description creates.

“Largely absent from this list of killers were extremists motivated by radical interpretations of Islam. Only one of the 50 murderers had any connection to Islamist extremism — and even he had ties to white supremacy,” Greenblatt claimed.

Most Islamic terror plots in the United States were unsuccessful in 2018. And the media quickly pounced with multiple pieces insisting that Islamic terrorism was no longer a claim, while overlooking many of the catastrophic terror plots that were broken up or proved unsuccessful.

An Italian court has cut the sentence given to a convicted murderer by a year because he has genes linked to violent behaviour — the first time that behavioural genetics has affected a sentence passed by a European court. But researchers contacted by Nature have questioned whether the decision was based on sound science. . . .

For the new report, Pietro Pietrini, a molecular neuroscientist at Italy’s University of Pisa, and Giuseppe Sartori, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Padova, conducted a series of tests and found abnormalities in brain-imaging scans and in five genes that have been linked to violent behaviour — including the gene encoding the neurotransmitter-metabolizing enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). A 2002 study led by Terrie Moffitt, a geneticist at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, had found low levels of MAOA expression to be associated with aggressiveness and criminal conduct of young boys raised in abusive environments.

In the report, Pietrini and Sartori concluded that Bayout’s genes would make him more prone to behaving violently if provoked. “There’s increasing evidence that some genes together with a particular environmental insult may predispose people to certain behaviour,” says Pietrini.

On the basis of the genetic tests, Judge Reinotti docked a further year off the defendant’s sentence, arguing that the defendant’s genes “would make him particularly aggressive in stressful situations”. Giving his verdict, Reinotti said he had found the MAOA evidence particularly compelling.

A study by a Harvard professor released this month found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings even though officers were more likely to interact physically with non-whites than whites.

The paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which examined thousands of incidents at 10 large police departments in California, Florida and Texas, concluded that police were no more likely to shoot non-whites than whites after factoring in extenuating circumstances.

“On the most extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings — we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,” said Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. in the abstract of the July 2016 paper.

Mr. Fryer, who is black, told The New York Times that the finding of no racial discrimination in police shootings was “the most surprising result of my career.”

At the same time, the study found blacks and Hispanics were more than 50 percent more likely to experience physical interactions with police, including touching, pushing, handcuffing, drawing a weapon, and using a baton or pepper spray.

Leipzig was last Thursday shaken by an unusual brutal rape in the middle of the East German city. It was in the popular park Rosental that a man in full daylight attacked a woman in her fifties, then raped her and in other ways abused her so brutally that she afterwards had to be admitted for emergency surgery in the hospital, German Stern reports.

The police report clarifies that the victim, who was jogging, was thrown to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the face, then dragged away to a nearby field where the rape was carried out.